Going Batty for Bats in the Classroom!

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We are going batty for bats in our classroom!  This is one of my favorite units to teach. There are so many engaging activities to do with your students. And bonus, so many ways to incorporate a variety of standards! Here are some of my favorite bat resources for the classroom.

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Before we really dive into learning about bats, I like to get an idea of how my students feel about bats. We take a poll, choosing if e think bats are helpful and harmful. 

bats harmful helpful

Favorite Bat Books

Kids love bat books, and luckily there are a lot of great books out there (fiction and nonfiction) that you can pull into your bat unit. Check out some of the bat books we use with our unit.

Favorite bat books

 

Stellaluna is our anchor fiction text we use during our bat unit. We dive deep into this book and look closely at vocabulary and story structure. We also practice sequencing events in the story. You can read more about our Stellaluna Interactive Read-aloud here.

What are some of your favorite bat books that you like to read with your students? 

Batty Breakfast

Bats eat a lot of mosquitos each night. In order to demonstrate the amount that they eat, we have a batty breakfast day!  Batty breakfast is a great activity to give students a visual as to how many mosquitoes a brown bat may eat in a hour.  Do you know how many?  Some scientists say up to 600 mosquitoes an hour.  That is a lot! We break our students into six groups. Each group is given a paper plate and a paper with 100 mosquitoes on it.  As a group, they need to work together to cut apart their mosquitoes and glue them onto the plate.  When each group is done, we have six plates with 100 mosquitoes on each plate. What a great math lesson!

batty breakfast- have students demonstrate how many mosquitos

bat schema chart

Would you like some mosquitoes to make your own batty breakfast?  Click here for your yummy mosquitoes!

Interactive Notebooks

I try to dedicate 1-2 days per week to work in our interactive notebooks. You can read more about interactive notebooks here. My kids love these!  Here are some of the activities you will find in the Bats interactive notebook pack.

There are many great vocabulary words to expose your little ones to when you are teaching about bats.  I always emphasize that we are scientists and we need to learn robust words.  They eat that up!

bat vocabulary interactive notebook page

 
 
Interactive notebooks for a bat unit- echolocation page

Sorts are a fun way to make your books interactive.  You can also use them as an assessment tool.  Watch your students sort the pieces and see if they are sorting them correctly.

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There are also venn diagram comparisons (bats/birds and bats/owls) and an anatomy page.  
Bats%2BIN%2Bcollage
 

Batty Math

In our math tubs, we place math activities that are bat and nocturnal animal themed. These activities provide review of the math concepts we have been working on in class.

 

All of these activities can be found in this Bats- Math Center Fun Pack.

math centers- Bats

Nonfiction Resources

If you are looking for nonfiction resources, be sure to check out the Nocturnal Animal Close Reads and Bats: A Nonfiction Resource.

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Bat Art

We have an amazing art teacher at our school! She does this bats at night art project each year that I absolutely love!

bats-at-night

bats at night2

More Bat  and Nocturnal Animal Resources

As you can see, we are definitely going batty for bats in our classroom! If you are looking for some of the above resources and more, check these out!

 

 

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